Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

mistake; she told Bill that he would go to jail if he didn’t stop acting in contempt of court orders.
    His voice grew steely.
    “If I go to jail, you’re going to your grave.”
    Bill also threatened John Compatore’s life. By making those death threats, he had violated the order of protection.
    On January 21, 2003, Bill Jensen’s harassment reached such a peak that Sue filed felony–domestic–violence charges against him. He was arrested, but he bailed out within a day. His adopted father, Chuck Jensen, put up his bail. Bill showed up for his court date on those charges, but Sue had been warned by a domestic violence victim’s advocate not to subject herself to that.
    Bill turned her absence into a win for himself; he obtained an order of protection against her.
    And all the while, Sue’s fear that Bill would do something violent toward her—and even toward their children—grew. The more he lost control of his own life, the more furious he became. His physical strength was gone, diminished when he failed to take advantage of physical therapy. Whether he really suffered from cardiac problems or leukemia—which he now claimed to have—Sue didn’t know.
    His financial empire had collapsed, and his career in law enforcement was over. Always before he had been able to blame Sue for what went wrong in his life. Of course, he still did, but any reprisals against her had to be done from a distance.
     
    Bill had an apartment where he could look down on a strip mall, a shopping area Sue had always frequented. One night, she and Scott had gone to Blockbuster to rent a video, and he apparently spotted her car. Close to midnight, she got a phone call from the Newcastle Police Department, in whose jurisdiction Bill’s apartment was located.
    “We understand you are harassing your husband,” an officer began. “You were stalking him at his apartment.”
    Sue put Scott on the phone. He volunteered that he and his mother had picked up a movie and then gone straight home, and they hadn’t gone to his father’s apartment. That seemed to satisfy the police.
    Bill next claimed that Sue had phoned him and threatened to kill him on at least two occasions. It was a ridiculous accusation. Sue was doing her best to maintain some kind of stable home for her children, although she knew it was a futile endeavor. They were full of teenage rage, missing the father they had once admired and loved, sometimes blaming her for the breakup of her marriage. Even when they sent him letters blaming him for deserting them, she knew they still loved him.
    Sue’s neighbors and friends had rallied around her when they witnessed the debacle of Bill’s departure from their home after the long standoff with police. Many of them gave statements and depositions about what they had observed in the Jensens’ volatile marriage. When he showed up at Scott’s or Jenny’s games, people turned away from him. Some of them were afraid of him; some were disgusted by his vendetta against his estranged wife.
    But almost everyone was concerned about what he might do. John Compatore stood beside Sue, and so did her sister, Carol. But basically she felt alone, stalked by a man who wouldn’t let her go, who told anyone who would listen that Sue had ruined his life. “She’s almost forced me to become a street person.”
    It didn’t matter that it was Bill who had thrown money away with abandon, most of it Sue’s. He wasn’t on the street, but he no longer had hundreds of thousands of dollars at his disposal.
    On Wednesday night, February 26, 2003, five days after the late-night phone call from police, Sue was cooking supper at 6:30. She heard a knock on their front door, and she opened it to find several Newcastle Police officers standing there. Thinking that they were responding to her complaint about Bill’s violation of the protective order, she invited them in and asked them if they would like a cup of coffee.
    “I was walking toward the kitchen,” she said, “when they told me to turn around and put my hands behind my back. They had come to arrest me!”
    Stunned, with Scott watching, Sue allowed herself to be handcuffed as the officers told her that Bill had reported that she had barged into his apartment, shouting, “I’m going to kill you, you bastard!”
    Had this been true, she would have violated the protection order he had obtained against her! The eighteen-year-old girl who was living with him had backed up Bill’s accusations,